The most noticable difference in the Inform6 for Unix package is that most of the includes have been removed. There has been a snit with the Debian people about whether or not Inform6 could legitimately be included in the Debian repositories given all those include files that had no clear distribution license. There is also a problem of bitrot there. I have therefore trimmed down the includes to those that 1) are known to be freely redistributable and 2) can be expected to work with the current compiler and library. Some of them needed altering to make them work with the alternative narrative voices offered by Library 6/12.

Aside from numerous bugfixes, the most noticable change in the Library is the ability to use first-person or third-person narrative voices. Almost all interactive fiction published so far works in the second-person voice. That is, "EAT COOKIE" causes "You eat the cookie." to be printed. In the first-person voice, this changes to "I eat the cookie". In the third-person voice, this becomes "David eats the cookie.". This can lead to all sorts of interesting new flavors of storytelling. I describe this in greater detail in https://github.com/DavidGriffith/inform ... voices.txt

I know there are still Inform6 users out there. I hear from them all the time. Please take a look at the new Library. Unix users, please check out my new package for building and installing the Inform6 development tools. I don't have the expertise to put together a new Inform6 compiler package for Windows. Would someone please do that for me? This beta will run a week or two. Please let me know what you think and tell me about any bugs you may find.

I don't know why the constant 'CONSTANT CLR_CURRENT 0' is not defined in parserm.h of library 6/11 & 6/12. It is very useful with @set_colour foreground background or SetColour(fg, bg). It appears in Chapter VII §42 page 311 of the DM4 manual.

Corrections 'Inform - Support - Patches - DM4 misprints' have not applied to the last html version of the DM4 manual.

I do not expect the DM4 to be updated. (Either for misprints or for the 6/12 changes.) It's a published book by Graham, it's his voice, and I wouldn't feel comfortable posting a version edited by someone else.

However, I'd put up a "What's new in 6/12" addendum document if someone wrote one up.

Right now I have another problem with DROP and implicit takes doing weird illogical things. Also, someone gave me a really good justification for adding a past tense narrative voice to the Library. That's turning out to be very simple.

I don't know why the constant 'CONSTANT CLR_CURRENT 0' is not defined in parserm.h of library 6/11 & 6/12. It is very useful with @set_colour foreground background or SetColour(fg, bg). It appears in Chapter VII §42 page 311 of the DM4 manual.

Corrections 'Inform - Support - Patches - DM4 misprints' have not applied to the last html version of the DM4 manual.

I'm not familiar with the constant CLR_CURRENT. I don't see it in 6/10 or any of the previous versions and don't see it in the DM4. How is it supposed to be used?

And if I want to use colors, I MUST SET CLR_ON TO 1 because in library it is never set, and it's always equal to 0 !?(Thanks to the (stupid!?) machine translator, it is hard to explain something in a language which is not his!)

Last edited by auraes on Tue Jul 29, 2014 11:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

Okay, I see what you mean. I've filed a bug report on this. See it at http://inform7.com/mantis/view.php?id=1377. I've applied the solution for Z-machine targets. For Glulx it's trickier. It's tricky because I don't think I've ever successfully compiled an Inform6 program using color control targeting the Glulx VM. To put it bluntly, it doesn't compile. Presumably Zarf wrote those portions of the Library dealing with Glulx color, so... Zarf, would you please take a look at the Glulx version of SetColour() and give me a hand?

_________________David Griffith

Last edited by DavidG on Tue Jul 29, 2014 4:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

By the way, would there be any chance of adding a "plural/singular" flag for the narrative voice? It'd actually be better for French (and presumably Spanish and Italian too), since we have different "you"s (the plural/formal one "vous", which is the one we use, but the informal, personal "tu", which may create an interesting narrative voice for a game); with such a flag we could actually distinguish both and conjugate verbs correctly. It shouldn't be too hard for English since verbs are conjugated almost the same whether it's singular or plural, so you can probably ignore the flag most of the times in the English routines; and then that also means you can have the narratives voices "We" or "They" (like, "The members of the sect wave their hands aimlessly." or "The Pikmin pick up the flower."). I hope it's not too much of a hassle for you to implement this, because it would be really interesting to be able to have both "vous" and "tu" in French.

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